Bye Mam, I Love You by Oatley Sonia & Barrett-Lee Lynne

Author:Oatley, Sonia & Barrett-Lee, Lynne
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784181567
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2014-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

BEAUTIFUL BECCA

How do you get through something like Christmas when you’re in the middle of a nightmare like we were living? I had no idea. How would anyone? But I think Becca must have been looking down on us all because, as Christmas approached, I could hear her voice in my ears constantly, telling me I must do it for Jack and Jessica. ‘Do it for them, Mam,’ she was urging. ‘They love Christmas too.’

So I did. One day I found sufficient strength to take a deep breath and get a few decorations from the under-stairs cupboards where we’d stashed them when we moved in. I also pulled out our old tree – a distressing business because it was a tree that had seen us through good times and bad. It was a 6ft-tall, bushy Highland fir, which looked incredibly real – even down to the pine cones – and needed very little in the way of decoration other than our string of warm white twinkle lights and the children’s homemade baubles and favourite tiny teddies. Becca had really loved that tree – every year we’d go out intending to buy a new one only to come back empty-handed. ‘Leave it, Mam,’ she’d say. ‘Let’s keep the one we already have – it’s nicer.’ And now she’d never see it again.

Jack and Jessica tried their best and it was heart-breaking to watch them, seeing their sad little faces as they hung baubles in virtual silence, knowing they were thinking exactly the same as I was – that their big sister should be doing it with them; that they should have all the Christmas songs blaring from the CD player and be singing along with them, while eating half the chocolate decorations between them, before they even made it to the tree. As a form of torture, it surely ranked among the most effective ever devised.

It was a particularly snowy winter and I was glad of it. Being snowed in meant I had an excuse to hide away, avoid everyone else’s Christmas preparations and to do what shopping I needed to do online. I felt Becca’s presence constantly; she’d always loved Christmas shopping and, as we lived a long way from Cardiff, her idea of Heaven was to travel up and shop there. Everything I did that Christmas I made myself do for her because I could constantly hear her telling me I had to think of Jess and Jack, to do my best for them.

My main concern was obviously to include her so, just before the day itself, the three of us, plus Linda and my eldest brother Robert made a trip to the cemetery where Becca was laid to rest with my Mam and Dad, taking wreaths, a couple of baskets of Christmas flowers and two little light-up decorated trees, to add to the mass of tributes and flowers already there. Once we were done it looked so beautiful, the twinkling lights of the trees casting coloured patterns on all the drifts of snow.

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